300 opened last night in London to packed cinemas, and we were there, on the front row of the Islington Vue for enhanced visual stimulation, enjoying every rippling bit of it. To call it a gloriously camp video game is an understatement. It's as close as you can get to gay porn, without getting an R18 certification.
The film oozes homosexual double-entendres all over the place, from a Xerxes modelled on RuPaul trying to get every muscular man to kneel before him, to a Rick Wolfmeier-lookalike Leonidas, leading an army of semi-naked muscle-marys. There are also some of the campest lines in the history of cinema:
Captain: On these shields, boys!
Persian Officer: SPARTANS! Lay down your weapons!
Leonidas: Persians...COME AND GET THEM!
Leonidas: We're in for one wild night!
Xerxes: Cruel Leonidas demanded that you stand. I require only that you kneel...
Leonidas: You have a good thrust!
Oh, and did I mention those rippling abs? We estimated that over 1m must crunches have gone into each actor's 'character' preparation. And not one of them was wasted...!
As for the whole Iran-US political controversy, it's simply far-fetched. The film is just brilliantly ridiculous, and if anything it's the Persians - with their multicultural army and grottesquely-complicated (and ineffective) war machines - that resemble the US, not the Spartans.
Another movie to... er... go down in history as a queer classic pretending to be a straight macho epic. Brilliant!
7 comments:
yes yes
hello lena H.
Were we in the same cinema?!
There were some visually jolly bits (I loved the campy mobile throne of the great Xerxes), but all those Goddamn battles where, a la Lord of the Rings, half the time I had no idea who was fighting whom, while for all the time I found it difficult to give a toss about any of them...
Um: but it was nice to see you, albeit briefly!
you really love the word ``ooze'' i've noticed.
crops up RATHER frequently.
Er... well... we all have our little bad habits, don't we?
i hear snow fall...
From the New Yorker...
When the Spartans, pumped like linebackers leaving the weight room, go out to fight, they wear nothing but leather codpieces and red capes; they die clutching one another’s hands. The Persians go one better. Their king, Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), an epicene seven-footer with a shaved head and what looks like a gold-lamé thong, lounges on cushions in his court, surrounded by aroused lesbians intertwined and writhing like snakes in a basket. When he goes out to fight, he commands an army of robed and turbaned slaves who enthusiastically hurl themselves onto Spartan spears. “300,” which grossed nearly a hundred and thirty million dollars in its first ten days of release, is perhaps the nuttiest film ever to become an enormous box-office hit. Based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, the movie is a porno-military curiosity—a muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an Army recruiting film.
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